AI Agent Engineering Lead

Groupon is a marketplace where customers discover new experiences and services everyday and local businesses thrive. To date we have worked with over a million merchant partners worldwide, connecting over 16 million customers with deals across various categories. In a world often dominated by e-commerce giants, we stand out as one of the few platforms uniquely committed to helping local businesses succeed on a performance basis.

Groupon is on a radical journey to transform our business with relentless pursuit of results. Even with thousands of employees spread across multiple continents, we still maintain a culture that inspires innovation, rewards risk-taking and celebrates success. The impact here can be immediate due to our scale and the speed of our transformation. We're a "best of both worlds" kind of company. We're big enough to have the resources and scale, but small enough that a single person has a surprising amount of autonomy and can make a meaningful impact.

The Mission: Build the Brains Behind Groupon’s Merchant AI

Groupon is undergoing a massive AI-first transformation, and this role is at its core. We’re building our first intelligent copilot for merchants—a chat-based assistant that can answer their toughest questions, automate deal creation, and redefine our entire partner experience.

As our AI Agent Engineering Lead, you will be the technical architect behind this new agent. You won't just be prototyping; you will architect, build, and ship the foundational agentic system that will power Groupon’s future interactions with our millions of merchant partners.

🚀What You’ll Build & Own

• Architect & Build our Merchant AI Copilot: Design and deliver our first agentic chat assistant from the ground up, using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), callable tools (LangSmith), and live internal data sources.

• Connect Real-World Data & Business Logic: Integrate the agent with complex merchant data—performance metrics, payout history, and fees—and encode Groupon’s specific business rules, content policies, and deal lifecycle logic.

• Implement Smart, Scalable Architecture: Create robust, structured question-response flows with clear fallback and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) escalations. Your work will be the scalable foundation for future support bots, onboarding assistants, and deal insight tools.

• Deliver with Engineering Excellence: Build and maintain the RESTful APIs and microservices that power the agent, ensuring high performance, scalability, and reliability on our cloud platforms (GCP & AWS).

🔎 Who You Are: The Ideal Candidate

• A Proven AI/LLM Builder: You are a hands-on engineer who has built and shipped AI agents or chatbots. You’re fluent in modern agentic patterns like RAG, tool-chaining, and prompt engineering and have connected them to real business data to solve complex problems.

• A Pragmatic Software Engineer: With 5+ years of experience, you have a strong background in backend engineering, distributed systems, and microservices. You are a polyglot at heart—your expertise is in building great software, not just in one language.

• A Collaborative Leader & Mentor: You thrive in a team environment and are passionate about mentoring others. While this is an individual contributor role to start, you will lead by example, guiding the team on technical decisions and best practices.

• A Product-Minded Problem Solver: You understand how to translate messy, real-world business needs into clean, effective technical solutions. Experience in marketplaces, e-commerce, or B2B SaaS (especially seller/merchant platforms) is a huge plus.

🧑🏼‍💻Our Tech & Tools

• AI / LLM: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LangSmith, Vector Databases, Prompt Engineering

• Cloud & Backend: GCP, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices

• Languages: We are language-agnostic. Bring your expertise in Python, Java, Go, etc.

• Databases & Caching: PostgreSQL, MySQL, NoSQL, Redis

• Collaboration: Jira, Asana, GitHub

💚The Team & Why You Should Join

You’ll join the global Merchant Organization (~35 engineers) and report directly to the Director of Engineering. You’ll work closely with a diverse team of product leaders and engineers spread across the US, Europe, and Asia.

Why Join Groupon?

• Build from Scratch, Not Just Maintain: This is a greenfield project. You will make foundational architectural decisions that shape our AI strategy for years to come.

• High-Impact & High-Visibility: This is a top-priority initiative with direct C-level involvement. Your work will be front-and-center in our company’s transformation.

• A True AI-First Culture: We are moving fast, experimenting, and investing heavily in using AI to solve our biggest challenges. You will be empowered to be innovative and disruptive.

• Define Your Career Trajectory: Start as our lead technical expert and grow with the program. This role has a clear path to formal leadership as we scale our agentic systems.

Groupon is an AI-First Company
We’re committed to building smarter, faster, and more innovative ways of working—and AI plays a key role in how we get there. We encourage candidates to leverage AI tools during the hiring process where it adds value, and we’re always keen to hear how technology improves the way you work. If you’re passionate about AI or curious to explore how it can elevate your role—you’ll be right at home here.

Groupon’s purpose is to build strong communities through thriving small businesses. To learn more about the world’s largest local e-commerce marketplace, click here. You can also find out more about us in the latest Groupon news as well as learning about our DEI approach. If all of this sounds like something that’s a great fit for you, then click apply and join us on a mission to become the ultimate destination for local experiences and services.

Beware of Recruitment Fraud: Groupon follows a merit-based recruitment process without charging job seekers any fees. We've noticed an increase in recruitment fraud, including fake job postings and fraudulent interviews and job offers aimed at stealing personal information or money. Be cautious of individuals falsely representing Groupon's Talent Acquisition team with fake job offers. If you encounter any suspicious job offers or interview calls demanding money, recognize these as scams. Groupon is not responsible for losses from such dealings. For legitimate job openings (and a sneak peek into life at Groupon), always check our official career website at Groupon Careers